60-acre estate hits the market in North Stamford

Updated 10:38 pm, Tuesday, November 12, 2013

STAMFORD -- A 59-acre property in North Stamford hit the real estate market last Friday, asking $7.5 million for the chance to create an 18-home planned community near the New York State border.

With tall trees reaching for the sky, and a topography filled with wetlands and ledges, the property is being billed as "58.7 acres of pure potential" by listing agent Catherine Richardson, of Keller Williams Realty.

"It's exciting," Richardson said Tuesday afternoon from her office on Long Ridge Road. "Who's going to be the one to make a splash in North Stamford?"

While Keller Williams is mainly marketing the property as a starting spot for a high-ticket home association, Richardson said there is always the potential that one discerning individual may see the potential in the sylvan stretch of land.

"We are marketing it to land developers and builders, but that's not to say that Jennifer Aniston can't come along and buy it and put one house there," Richardson said with a sly smile.

The property, dubbed Rock Rimmon Estates, has already been subdivided into 18 total lots of two acres or more, making its way through the city's planning board back in June of 2005. That's when the current owner, New Dinamax, LLC, first set forth plans to transform the former country estate of Clairol founders Lawrence and Joan Clair Gelb into a private community.

But with an original asking price of $23 million, the project fizzled.

Until last week.

"Now is the right time for something like this," said Richardson. "Real estate is up about 5 percent this year in Stamford, and people are a little bit more confident."

While the ticket price begins at $7.5 million for the whole parcel, there are two other options for purchasing the land: A roughly 8-acre piece with access from Rockrimmon Road can be purchased separately for $1 million, or the main, 50-acre parcel with 16 lots can be purchased for $6.65, according to the listing.

"The objective is not to jam in as many lots as possible," said John Leydon, a Stamford land use attorney representing New Dinamax. "The idea is to provide for development that's consistent with the natural attributes of the sit, which are just beautiful. There's a stream that runs through part of it and rolling hills. It's really envisioned to be quite pretty."

The asking price is significantly lower than its pre-Recession version, but developers have already began trying to haggle it down.

"It's not a steal, really, because the developers have to go in and they have to build these houses -- some on two acres, some on three acres -- and they have to do all the infrastructure too," said Richardson, ticking off a laundry list of needs like septic systems, water supplies and roads. "So if they built homes for $1.5 million up to $3 million, they still have to make money and sell them. So what I'm hearing right now is, `Ooh, that seems a bit high.' But I have several serious builders looking at it."

In fact, after only one business day on the market, Richardson had heard interest from about 20 developers, both across the globe and around the corner. But even if a developer were to bite right away, it will likely be a couple years until the community was ready to be occupied.

"It's really rough land. There's a lot of ledge and wetlands, so there's a significant amount of work that has to go into it," said Richardson.

Before being purchased by New Dinamax for $8.2 million in 2003, the property served as a country estate for the Gelb family who founded Clairol after discovering technology for hair dye on a trip to France. The Gelbs spent most of their time in Manhattan, but in 1939 they bought the Stamford property as a weekend escape and a playground for their children, whose hunting posts can still be spotted around the land. Lawrence Gelb, who moved Clairol's operations to Stamford from a Manhattan loft, lived on the property until 2000.

"I feel like when you stand on the property, you just breathe in the potential," said Mary Strico, a transaction manager for Keller Williams. "When you just walk around, you can soak in what could be. And it's overwhelming to take a look at it and know that someone's going to come in with the right vision, and they're going to completely change that whole area."